Learning Curve: Dealing with Real Life

Hello again, it’s been a while since I last wrote anything for several (largely boring for you) reasons. The main point is that real life threw a few spanners into my hobby engine and now that things are settling back down a little I thought I would share my experiences.

A while ago I switched from card gaming (mainly the Spoils) back to miniature war gaming as the arrival of my children was stopping me from attending enough meetings to make the expenditure worth while. I dislike playing others over the internet as I like the social side of my hobbies and have found the internet to be a hotbed of know-it-all hacks and bloggers. The point was that I would be able to paint in the evenings again and that led to the start of Sunday Colour . It gave me a sense of purpose other than just being the bread-winner for the family and allows me to focus on the moment rather than the ever-present soul destroying force that is reality.

Put into the shortest terms I got promoted which includes occasional short-notice travel and my wife went back to work after her maternity leave finished at around the same time. The combination threw my hobbying into disarray whilst I scrambled around still trying to do all of the games and things I was doing at the standard I wanted too.

This is where I get to the point, I promise. I basically had to take a backwards step and re-define what it was that I wanted to achieve by doing all of those games and spending all that time on them now that I was going to have (potentially a lot) less free time. The answer? I was trying to enjoy myself. So I have decided to put some of the games on the back-burner for now in order to play, paint and collect those that I find most enjoyable. 40K will stick around as will Blood Bowl (since it’s the newest old hotness). Infinity is great and I have 300 plus points all set so I can just go and play and because I have kickstarter bits for ArcWorlde and Trudvang coming these two will make the five for 2017.

This combination of games that require smaller amounts of figures and a good mixture of competitive to fun and hard sci-fi to full on fantasy should tick all of the boxes I need and allow me to pursue completion of my Lions Blade formation for 40K with just enough different stuff to get my teeth into hobby wise when I get fed-up with painting Dark Angels. At least until the next change in my life happens!

I think that this is quite a good idea for a lot of us to have a go at especially if you have hobby burnout or are experiencing an unpredictable amount of free-time. It really allowed me to stop thinking “I’ll never get all of this done.” and focus on getting what I needed for my top five games done on a game-by-game basis. I’d highly recommend that anyone do this as a mental de-cluttering process.

Thanks for reading, rest assured that I will be continuing to write semi-interesting an occasionally amusing columns going forwards! Next week I’ll focus on my progress (or lack of it) as a 40K commander and then some Blood Bowl coaching failures. At some point I really will do that ice effect tutorial too… -Mark!

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